Software services will drive the next wave of growth for Taiwanese hardware makers in a market led by cloud services from Apple Inc and Google Inc, an IBM Taiwan official said on Thursday during a celebration of the US-based tech giant’s 100th founding anniversary.
“Taiwan’s hardware manufacturing ability is among the best in the world, but as the profit of most original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) has become thinner in recent years, these firms should add more value to their products,” IBM Taiwan general manager Edward Yu (于弘鼎) said.
Software applications for cloud computing technology, such as the new services recently introduced by Google and Apple, will become the key drivers for such growth, he said.
Last month, Google announced at Computex Taipei that its Web-centric Chromebook laptop PC will be available for rental to the business market for US$28 per user per month, while its monthly rental price in the educational market would be just US$20 per user. On June 6, at its Worldwide Developers’ Conference, Apple launched its iCloud music streaming service, which allows users to access and play their music from any Apple device.
Taiwan is one of the 140 countries in IBM’s “Growth Markets Unit,” which accounted for 21 percent of IBM’s global revenue last year, Yu said.
IBM expects the unit to contribute 30 percent of the company’s global revenue in 2015, as the change in business models will bring more business opportunities, he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts